Chasing Shadows
by DaughteroftheSeagod
Summary: After they saved the world you'd think that they were entitled to get a break right? Think again. The lives of the world's mightiest heroes change when Fury comunicates them some shocking news. Apparently they have children, mini assassins-genius-godly-with angry issues-children and they have to find them. Seems like a piece of cake after all they've been through, it isn't.


**Well this is my first attempt at an Avengers fanfiction and I hope you like it.**

**I know that once you read the story you are going to be like 'they are not old enough to have pre teen children' or 'they haven't been together long enough to conceive' or 'they weren't together at all', but I promise all will be explained.**

**IMPORTANT PLEASE READ!: Okay I've made a lot of modifications to the dates so they can fit in this story and I put it here so you won't be so confused. Whatever is not in here WILL be explained as the story goes on.**

**1)The 'Battle of New York' took place in August 21****st****, 2010 and this story starts a few months after.**

**2) Captain America awoke in 1993, he met Beth (the blonde waitress in the movie) in 1994 and they got married in 1995.**

**3) Pepper and Tony got married in 1994.**

**4) Bruce and Betty are in a stable relationship since 1990 and got married in 1992.**

**5)Thor had already came to Earth in the 90's and has already met Jane and was able to carry on with a relationship with her and getting her pregnant.**

**6) Clint was 19 when he brought Natasha with him to SHIELD, Natasha was 16 and they got married in 1996 when they were 23 and 20 respectively.**

**7) ALL OF THEM except Tony, Thor (duh) and maybe Bruce, are in their early thirties.**

**Sorry for any mistakes in spelling or grammar, this chapter wasn't beta'd and english isn't my mother tounge.**

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**Chapter 1: Shocking News**

Natasha and Clint walked through SHIELD to the conference room, where Fury had summoned them. The Avengers, all of them, Thor included were there. Even their wives, fiancées in Tony's case, were there.

"Now that we are all here we can start" Fury said when they entered the room. "What I'm going to tell you is going to seem crazy, but I need you to listen to me before you start pointing guns, hammers and bows at my head" He said his only looking pointedly at everyone of them.

"Just spit it out Fury" Tony said rolling his eyes.

"Well the fact is that some of your memories have been altered in order to protect you… and your children" He said, hesitating for a moment, there was a minute of silence after he said this.

"That's ridiculous I've never been with child and I'm pretty sure that neither of the women in this room has been either" Pepper said, flummoxed.

"I think you'll understand more if you look at these profiles" Fury said opening a few holograms in front of them. They were profiles just like theirs but the names were what caught their attention.

_Daniel Francis Barton_

_Alexandra Susan Barton_

_Victoria Abigail Stark_

_Malcolm Howard Stark _

_Anne Marie Banner_

_Diana Catherine Rogers _

_James William Rogers_

_Vivian Astra Foster_

_Luke Aaric Foster_

All of them were labeled as extremely dangerous and had videos of a bunch of kids in different missions. The eldest of the lot barely looked 12 years old in the footage, but they all managed to knock out 20 grown men, retrieve something that looked like a dvd and exit the building in no more than 10 minutes.

"This is bullshit, marriage wasn't something that I pictured in my life fourteen years ago and having children wouldn't have crossed my mind" Tony said.

"Tony's right for once, Tasha and I have never even thought of children" Clint said agreeing with Tony.

"This doesn't make any sense" Steve said "I would remember having children, being a parent is not something you forget overnight"

"Look, I know that this is hard to believe but it's the truth" Fury said.

"But if this is true why is that none of us have any recollection of ever having children?" Betty asked, trying to understand how she was able to forget her child.

"Well, it all started eleven years ago. You lot had never met each other, Tony you were still working with weapons and Pepper you had your three little genius to take care of, Bruce you were happily married to Betty and were expecting Anne, Steve and Beth you were happy with your toddlers, Thor you were a really proud papa along with you Jane, Natasha and Clint you both were in this happy-assassins-over protective- parent mode and let your kids loose in SHIELD more than I would've liked" He sighed. "But this happy bubble that you were all living in explode when the threats started"

"What kind of threats are you talking about?" Tony asked, his mind going back to Obadiah Stane.

"It'll be better if I show you what happened" Fury said taking the files and standing up. "Follow me"

Fury led them to a strange room were neither of them- not even Natasha or Clint- have ever been before. It had eleven chairs that had wires around were the head should be.

"We've been working on these since the children went into hiding two years ago. These" he said gesturing to the weird looking chairs "should be able to restore your memories" Fury looked at them when neither of them moved. "Do you want a written invitation? Sit!"

Hesitantly all of them sat and got wired up by SHIELD agents.

"Fury, why did you only start working on these after the children went missing?" Betty asked.

"I'll tell you when you come back"

"What do you-" Her question was cut off as memories began to flash before her eyes.

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Fury watched as one by one everyone began to 'wake'. He sighed knowing that they just relived one of the most painful memories in their lives. He remembered that day clearly, everyone held onto their children for as long as they could, all of them knew that they will most likely not see them ever again. The sound of Thor's pained cry after he handed Vivian to Phil still haunted his mind. He could still remember the endless amount of tears that left Natasha's eyes while putting her children into his arms, telling him to take good care of them. He'd never seen her cry before and that was something he never wanted to see again.

When the last member of the team woke up they begin to throw questions at him.

"SHUT UP!" He shouted, his head was thankful for this as he had been developing an intense headache for the past few minutes. "Now, I'll answer all your questions, ONE at a time" He said loudly when he saw them all open their mouths.

"You said that you'd tell me why you started working on these" Betty said gesturing to the chairs. "Only after the children went missing" Fury sighed, he knew that they will most definitely not like the answer to Betty's question.

"We didn't want you involved, you put too much effort on keeping them safe and if we told you right away, before we tried to find them on our own, that effort might have been wasted" He told them bracing himself for the verbal assault that was he was sure was going to happen.

"What do you mean by not getting us involved because of their safety? That's BS and you know it! We are their parents; we had the right to know!" Tony said enraged.

"And what good would that have done? You didn't even remember having kids, and in the case you did, you were most probably going to go looking for them! Endangering their and yours lives in the process!" Fury told him, knowing that Tony would've done just that.

"But we would've at least known!" Steve exploded. Everyone turned to him surprised that he had raised his voice. "We would've helped you even if it was from the sidelines" He said, his voice merely a whisper.

"Why now?" Natasha asked, her eyes lightly red.

"What do you mean?"

"Why are you telling us now? You weren't planning on it, so why? Or better yet, what made you change your mind?" She asked fiercely.

"We're hanging onto anything that we know about them, from where they used to tell us they'd like to go to, to their favorite brand of chewing gum" He sighed. "We are only resorting to you because we've ran out of options. They questioned us about their parents every time they could, we hope that if they know that you are looking for them they'll let you find them"

"So you're using us as bait" Jane said, it wasn't a question, but a statement. "And when you find them what do you plan on doing? Wiping our memories clean again?" She asked, her eyes ablaze.

"No, I plan on them to return with you. Everything that threatened you is no longer around or hasn't showed in a long time, so I deem it safe for them to return to you"

"And what do you want us to do? It's not as if we could announce the world that the Avengers have lost the children that they didn't remembered having" Pepper said.

"You're the world mightiest heroes and their scary girlfriends. You have at least four genius and three expert hackers in your team, you'll think of something. Shall you have any more questions, by all meanings ask" Fury said, leaving the room.

The 10 people in the room spent five minutes looking at each other as if expecting someone to come up with something to find their _extremely dangerous_ children.

"What are we going to do?" Clint asked breaking the silence.

"For starters I would stand a little farther away from Natasha" Tony said noticing the murderous look on the red head.

"Yeah, I think you're right" Clint said eyeing his wife.

"Now, I think we need to see those files again. See what we can get out of there" Bruce said cutting to the chase. There were many murmurs of agreement as everyone began to go through the files.

"Here it says that Victoria, James, Charles and Anne helped with the hellicarrier and that all of them have hacked into SHIELD on more than one occasion" Pepper said frowning. "They probably know what has been happening around here"

"Do you think they'll want to be with us, that they'll love us, shall we manage to find them?" Thor asked, everyone looked at him and immediately looked away. The friendly and happy God they knew was gone, leaving behind a man with hollow eyes and a miserable expression.

_We can only hope they will._ All of them thought while they began going through the files again.

"Ok, so far we know that they were trained since they were able to walk, they started to go on missions when Anne, the youngest, was six years old, all of them on their own free will, and they ascended to the best agents of SHIELD in just two years. They were trained by the best agents they had along with some marines. They were homeschooled by the scientists in here along with some university teachers since they were five. They were forced to learn how to cook after they destroyed the kitchen. They caused an explosion the day they escaped SHIELD which caused breakdown on their operations allowing them to go away unnoticed without any cameras filming their disappearing act" Steve said looking down at the notebook where he had written everything that they thought was important.

"So basically we have the chances of a snowball in hell on finding them" Clint said. They had spent the last hour going through the files and so far they hadn't got anything on where they might be.

"S.H.I.E.L.D. has basically searched the entire globe looking for them, they have searched the footage of every security camera for the last two years on a daily basis, and they have contacted security agencies of every country in the world to have them look for them. They have pictures of them with every haircut, hair color, tone skin, eye color and even nose; and they have found nothing at all" Jane said. "Clint is right, we're screwed"

"There's got to be something in here, because we are not-" Steve was cut off by Beth.

"Wait, Jane did you say that they have pictured them in every kind of way that they would have tried to alter from their appearance?" Beth asked. Jane looked at her puzzled, but nodded anyway. "What if the reason that they can't find them is because they are not themselves, like if they were… using some sort of thing like the ones they used in 'Total Recall' to look like somebody else?" Everyone looked at her in amazement.

"You know, that could be possible. They are not stupid, they knew that Fury was going to go looking for them everywhere, and that they were not going to be free for a long time if they couldn't show their faces" Pepper said.

"This just got even more difficult, at least we knew who we were looking for before now we don't even have that" Bruce said.

"Not necessarily" Natasha said. "If they are going by someone else, they're most likely going by someone dead. It's basically impossible to create a new human being, but with someone dead creating a new identity is rather easy; the names wouldn't cause any suspicion; there are a lot of people who have the same names and it's not impossible for people to look similar to somebody else. Besides they have hacked into S.H.I.E.L.D. who says they couldn't create new ID's by the name of someone dead if they wanted to?" They to hand it to Natasha, everything she said made perfect sense, but they hated to admit the fact that they're children would do something like that.

"I'll have Jarvis start looking for any people around their ages that has died and reappeared in the past three years, It shouldn't take long to find a match" Tony said tipping something in is phone.

"So how much time will it take Jarvis to find a match?" Steve asked when the silence became too awkward.

"Not much longer. Government codes are the easiest think to hack into, in fact there was one time when I-" Jarvis interrupted what could have become another one of Tony's ridiculous stories. "Sir I have found three hundred and seventy four matches for the description Miss Romanoff gave me"

"Didn't you say that there wouldn't be a lot of matches?" Steve asked Natasha.

"There are more than three hundred million people in the US cap, anything below fifty thousand is labeled as a few" Clint said already going through some names and writing down some addresses.

"What's the plan Man of Iron?" Thor asked, a little confused as to what had just happened.

"Since Fury has basically given us permission to do anything to fin our mini assassins-genius-godly-with angry issues-children, I don't think that he'll get mad if I accidentally violate some of their constitutional rights" Tony said as he started to move his fingers across the keyboard of a computer that appeared out of nowhere.

"What can we do to help?" Beth asked beside Steve, who was having a battle with himself on whether he should stop Tony or let it slide to find their children.

"Beth, you're a law student right?" she nodded. "Then you know how to boss people around. I want you, Betty and Pepper to go out and tell the first agent you see to get every bit of information they have on these people" He said handing her a paper. Betty grabbed the paper and they left. "Legolas and Anastasia, when those three are back you two and captain tightpants will each lead a five people squad to the ones that you think could be the kids. Beach boy, don't you have some guy up there that sees all that is happening?" Thor nodded "Well? Go ask him if he sees where the children are!" Thor went out of the room like a bullet after that, Tony then pointed at Jane and Bruce. "You two come with me" Jane and Bruce followed him to the lab. "Bruce, Anne is like you, so she must send some kind of gamma radiation from wherever she is, I want you to recalibrate the ecuation that you used to find the Tesseract to something more similar to you so it can help us find her and the others" Bruce started working immediately. "The labs still have their spectrometers on their roofs and calibrated for gamma radiation, it would take six hours tops" Bruce said. "Excellent. Jane, you're an astrophysicist, I found out that there have been some alterations in the stars like the ones we've had when Thor came here. I need you to find out if some Norse deity that isn't our favorite thunder god has been coming to visit lately" He pulled out a hologram-computer beside him and typed on it for a few seconds before information and photographs began to fill the screen. "Here is all the information that has been found about these phenomena's in the last two years along with your own research of Thor's first arrival, compare them and see if your children have some almighty uncle or aunty on their side or-god forbid- godly grandparents" Jane stood in front of the screen and started typing away and using complex computer programs to see all the fluctuations in the space and compare them. "This might take a while Tony" Was the only thing she said before throwing herself in her research. "I don't care how long it takes as long as we are able to find them"

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**Well I hope you liked it, I don't know when I'll have the next chapter up since I'm finishing my school year and the teachers are kicking my ass with the tests, but I'll update as soon as I get it done. It will hopefully be before the month is over. Review!**


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